BEIJING - The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 grew more puzzling Tuesday as reports suggested the plane may have veered more than 300 miles west of its intended flight path and flew lower and longer than previously thought. Although the flight from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing disappeared from civilian air traffic control screens at 1:30 a.m. Saturday, military sources told the Malaysian press that it was detected by the military at 2:40 a.m. over the Strait of Malacca - a narrow stretch of water off the west coast of the Malay peninsula.

Joe McGinniss, the adventurous and news-making author and reporter who skewered the marketing of Richard Nixon in "The Selling of the President 1968" and tracked his personal journey from sympathizer to scourge of convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald in the blockbuster "Fatal Vision," died Monday at a hospital in Worcester, Mass. He was 71. McGinniss died from complications of prostate cancer, according to his attorney and longtime friend Dennis Holahan. Few journalists of his time so intrepidly pursued a story, burned so many bridges or more memorably placed themselves in the narrative, whether insisting on the guilt of MacDonald after seemingly befriending him or moving next door to Sarah Palin's house for a most unauthorized biography of the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate.

WASHINGTON - Outside accountants and lawyers who reveal fraud and wrongdoing at publicly traded companies are protected as whistle-blowers just as employees are, the Supreme Court ruled, expanding the reach of an anti-fraud law passed in the wake of the collapse of companies such as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. The 6-3 decision Tuesday will affect the mutual fund and financial services industries in particular because they rely heavily on outside contractors and advisors. Denying whistle-blower protection to all outside employees of such companies would leave a "huge hole" in the 2002 law, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noting that most mutual fund companies hire independent investment advisors and contractors rather than employees.

Sitting in a spare office on the sixth floor of City Hall, a sweeping view of San Bernardino behind him, the incoming mayor paused a conversation and picked up a ringing phone. It was somebody wanting to know what time the office closed. "I don't think I was supposed to answer that," he said, cracking a smile. Carey Davis didn't hide the fact that he doesn't yet know his way around City Hall. If anything, the 61-year-old accountant sees his status as a political newcomer as an advantage as he takes the helm of a deeply troubled city.

WASHINGTON - A Senate subcommittee investigation accused Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse of using elaborate "cloak and dagger" methods to hide the accounts of 22,000 wealthy American citizens with a total of up to $12 billion in assets from U.S. authorities so they could avoid paying taxes. The bipartisan probe also sharply criticized the Justice Department for being lax in using subpoenas and other legal tools to pressure the bank to reveal most of the names of account holders, which have been withheld as part of a long Swiss tradition of bank secrecy.

The first Honda Fit rolled off the assembly line Friday at a new $800-million factory near Celaya, Mexico, a symbol of the growing might of the country's auto industry. Honda's U.S. factories spit out hundreds of thousands of Accords and Civics each year. But when the automaker redesigned the Fit for North America, it turned to Mexico for an increasingly skilled workforce and favorable export rules. Mexico already accounts for about 18% of North American auto production, but that's expected to jump to 25% by 2020 as automakers pour billion of dollars into factories, said Joe Langley, an analyst at IHS Automotive.

TEMPE, Ariz. - It's far too early to determine how Albert Pujols will rebound from a subpar season that was cut short by a left-foot injury, but early returns on the slugger are encouraging. "I feel awesome," said Pujols, who had right-knee surgery after 2012 and suffered a partial tear of the plantar fascia in his left foot last July. "To be able to do things with no pain or discomfort, to have my legs underneath me, to move around and have the load I want in my swing … that's the biggest difference.

The Los Angeles Police Commission is poised to adopt a major shift in the way it judges police shootings, tying an officer's decision to pull the trigger to his actions in the moments leading up to the incident. The rule change, which will be taken up Tuesday, would settle years of debate over whether the commission can make a determination that a shooting violated department policy if the officer created a situation in which deadly force was necessary. Until now, the commission has generally focused on the narrow question of whether an officer faced a deadly threat at the moment he opened fire.

For some children in Syria, the civil war is a particular kind of hell. The details of a United Nations report released last week are chilling and gut-wrenching, and go far beyond the kind of civilian slaughter that accompanies shelling of residential neighborhoods - a reproachable hallmark of the fighting in that country. Despite encountering significant hurdles in reaching witnesses, U.N. investigators documented cases in which children as young as 11 were subjected to sexual attacks, their fingernails being pulled, electric shocks to genitalia and beatings.

WASHINGTON - A former Salvadoran general accused of overseeing the torture and killing of thousands of civilians during a 12-year civil war appealed a U.S. deportation order Thursday on the grounds that his nation's anti-communist campaign was backed and funded by the American government. An attorney for Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was El Salvador's defense minister and leader of the National Guard in the 1980s, repeatedly cited the U.S. support for his country's right-wing government during its war against leftist guerrillas.